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We set up a consistent place on the hard drive for all our webapps to write data. Rather than each application playbook dealing with granting ReadWrite permission to Tomcat in systemd, we should grant Tomcat permission to the base data directory. Then, all the web applications we install on that server will be able to write data.

We are starting to want to run CentOS on servers. We need to update our Ansible roles to work with RPM based distros as well as DEB.

Playbooks need to know some things about the Tomcat install in order to deploy applications.

We need to declare a variable for the webapps path. Not only because people put it in different places; but also because web application playbooks need to know where to put their WAR files.

We need to declare a few variables for Tomcat in the role. These could still be overridden in the group_vars; but keep in mind, we're using the distro version of Tomcat. So changing directory paths or the tomcat user require quite a bit of custom code to alter Tomcat's configuration files. It's probably best just to use the defaults from Ubuntu.

For several years we've been changing the default location to /srv/webapps. However, it requires some complicated XML and ini file configuration changes, which are hard to do in Ansible (or docker).

We should just start using the default location set by Ubuntu
/var/lib/tomcatX/webapps

We still need to declare {{ tomcat_webapps }} as a variable, so application playbooks know where to install themselves.

The old way of doing apt with-items is deprecated. The new way is to declare a variable for all the package names.

New style for apt-get install

- name: "Install Dependencies"
  apt:
    name: "{{ packages }}"
    state: present
  vars:
    packages:
      - "postgis"

Old, deprecated style

- name: "Install Dependencies"
  apt:
    name: "{{ item }}"
    state: present
  with_items:
    - "postgis"

Ubuntu 14.xx, 16.xx, and 18.xx all used Tomcat 8. This is hard coded in the ansible role. It should not have been. Now that Ubuntu 20.04 uses Tomcat 9, we have to rewrite the ansible role.

We tackled this problem in the Postgres role with distribution vars.